I ran out of room

May 23, 2001

I ran out of room yesterday to talk about another project, an ASP Intranet Phonebook. I finally got tired of searching for a good ASP-based phone directory system. So I created my own. Pretty neat, it’s setup to edit via a browser and it does work. I have about 300 phone numbers to enter and when one needs to be changed, it can be done faster than opening up FrontPage and editing the file. I’m using Access2k but I had to downgrade my file to work with the Access97 drivers on the intranet server. It’s pretty basic, but it gets the job done. My next project will be to create my own content management system…but that’s way off. I need to get a few bugs out of the system and make sure that I intentionally do what needs to be done instead of this happy accident. Oh BTW, the program is (initially) called “Phone Director”.

For some reason, I’ve been able to pick up some things that I’ve initially avoided, like working with Access. I like Lotus Approach a lot better, but Access works with so many systems. I’m starting to get excited again about how I can incorporate databases into my web documents. Linux is a similar thing. I’ve been able to just sit down and mess around with it for the past months. I wouldn’t have expected that 6 months ago. My next system won’t have a Windows partition as it’s main drive. More than likely it will run RedHat and I’ll either use VMWare or just boot into Windows from LILO. I’m also at the point (I know I keep talking about this) that FrontPage is more of an annoyance than it should be. It’s great when using databases, but NetObjects is my new tool set. The management is up to par and seems to work well.

This page still doesn’t correctly render under IE5 for Mac and it seems to almost look perfect under Mozilla on Linux and Win32. The resume page isn’t rendering correctly. I still have some ghosts in the machines.So this weekend, I’m going to clear some rough spots on this nice new clean site.